Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/66

 although it remains inexact ('unpassend, literally 'unsuitable') for a party whose economic program is not simply a general Socialist one, but definitely Communist—for a party whose final political aim is the supersession of the whole State and, therefore, also of Democracy. But the names of real (the italics are Engels') political parties never completely correspond with fact: the party develops, the name remains."

The dialectician Engels remains true to dialectics to the last day of his life. Marx and I, he says, had a splendid, scientific, exact name for the party, but there was no real party, that is, no mass-proletarian party. Now, at the end of the 19th century, there is a real party; but its name is scientifically incorrect. Never mind, "it will pass muster," only let the party grow, only let not the scientific inexactness of its name he hidden from it, and let it not hinder its development in the right direction.

Perhaps, indeed, some humorist might comfort us Bolsheviks a la Engels: we have a real party, it is developing splendidly; even such a meaningless and barbarous term as "Bolshevik" "will pass muster" although it expresses nothing but the purely accidental fact that at the Brussels-London Conference of 1903 we had a majority (Boshinstvo). Perhaps now, when the July and August persecutions of our party by the Republican and "revolutionary" middle-class democracy have made the word "Bolshevik" such a universally respected name; when, in addition, these persecutions have signalized such a great historical step forward made by our party in its actual development, perhaps now even I should hesitate ‘to repeat my April suggestions, to change the name of our party. Perhaps I would propose a "compromise" to our comrades, to call ourselves the Communist Party, but to retain "Bolsheviks" in brackets. …

But the question of the name of the party is incomparably less important than the question of the relation of the revolutionary proletariat to the State.

In the usual debates about the State the mistake is constantly made against which Engels cautions us here, and which we have indicated above. Namely, it is constantly forgotten that the destruction of the State involves also the destruction of. Democracy; that the withering away of the State also means the withering away of Democracy. At first sight such a statement seems exceedingly strange and incomprehensible. Indeed, perhaps someone or other may begin to fear lest we be expecting the advent of such an order of Society in which the principle of majority rule